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Everything in the Aleppo ambulance was orange, the walls, the chairs, but a little grey figure was hastily carried in an aid worker’s arms to be placed gently but briskly in an adult-size plastic chair and left alone. His right arm had been wrapped around his rescuer’s back, the way children’s small hands always cling to the shoulder blades of adults. It’s how you stay attached to the person in charge of your safety.

Adults are adults; children are children. Adults protect children. That’s the way it is, and that’s why what follows should bring a wave of help and protection from Canadians.

Omran Daqneesh, five years old but small for his age, looked old and grey. His skin was as thick with grey dust as were adult 9/11 survivors trudging through the streets of New York so long ago, when the U.S. began planning its revenge. Omran’s hair was grey, as were his face, his baby-fat legs and arms, his shorts and his T-shirt featuring CatDog from the American Nickelodeon cartoons.

Every single thing about Omran looked unnatural, from the dirt to the way he sat still and silent as children never do. But the worst thing was the look in his eye. The other eye was covered in bloody jam. Amid the noise and shouting around him, Omran was quietly in shock. His head was tilted downward but he looked up, stunned and confused but strangely reproachful. His mouth was puffy with distress.

He brushed his hand against his face, looked at his hand and saw thick clotted blood. He would never have seen such a quantity of his own blood before. Children are taught always to keep their hands clean so, obediently, he tried to brush his bloodied hand on the seat of the chair.

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“I’ve seen so many children rescued out of the rubble, but this child, with his innocence, he had no clue what was going on,” the Aleppo journalist Mustafa al-Sarout told the Guardian. “I’ve photographed a lot of airstrikes in Aleppo, but there was so much there in his face, the blood and dust mixed, at that age.” (Photojournalist Mahmoud Raslan also wrote of his coverage for the Telegraph.)

Omran Daqneesh didn’t cry as he was treated, but asked for his parents. “Only then, once Omran saw them did he start to cry,” reported Sophie McNeill of ABC News. Omran’s parents and siblings are alive after the attack in the rebel-held Qaterji neighbourhood of Aleppo.
(MAHMOUD RSLAN / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

The surgeon who treated him said Omran was “frightened and shocked. He had been sitting safely in his home, perhaps asleep. And the house was brought down on top of him. When we were treating him, he was not screaming or crying, just in shock.”

Elsewhere in the Guardian, Zaher Sahloul, a physician from Chicago, described what working in Aleppo is like. He recalls Abdullah, 12, “injured by shrapnel from a barrel bomb. He asked me, screaming in pain but still somehow polite, to stop trying to insert a tube into his chest without anesthetic. ‘I kiss your hand uncle, please stop,’ he begged. But we had no painkillers and he would die if I did not drain the blood pooling around his lungs so I carried on.”

Sahloul, who risks his own life daily, says the emergency has been going on for five years. He asks people in the West to send money to doctors and aid groups who deliver medical supplies, medicine and ambulances, and train local doctors and nurses.

As for Omran, he didn’t cry as he was treated, but asked for his parents. “Only then, once Omran saw them did he start to cry,” reported Sophie McNeill of ABC News. Omran’s parents and siblings are alive.

Five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, with bloodied face, sits with his sister inside an ambulance after they were rescued following an airstrike in the rebel-held al-Qaterji neighbourhood of Aleppo, Syria on Wednesday

As well, I do wish Omran and his family could be brought to Canada, where we know they would be welcomed, especially by the many Syrians already here. This may seem absurd, when so many are suffering in the catastrophe that is Syria and surrounding nations, to yearn to help one child, but it is human nature to feel extremely protective in cases that are not abstract.

If you watched the video, you saw Omran’s face. He’s too young to understand us. But what would he think of us if he knew we could have helped him and his family, and did not? They don’t talk to children about adults like that. We’d rather they didn’t know.

John McCallum is the Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship. A compassionate and sensible man, he may be the politician to contact to ask that the Daqneesh family be welcomed here. When the next bomb falls, they may not be so lucky. Although they were not lucky at all.

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